Abraham Lincoln, the One President All of Them Want to Be More Like

Slide Show | Lincoln’s Unattainable Standard John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago, but the martyred president’s legacy is still felt at the White House.

Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

April 14, 2015

WASHINGTON — In an exhibition just a few dozen feet from where Abraham Lincoln died 150 years ago hangs a picture of President Obama taking the oath of office. His left hand rests on Lincoln’s Bible, the culmination of a campaign that opened in Lincoln’s town, citing Lincoln’s words.

Mr. Obama is hardly the first president to associate himself with the martyred commander in chief, nor will he be the last. As the nation commemorates the anniversary of the assassination with re-enactments, books, films, exhibits and a candlelight vigil, Lincoln lives on in the White House, inspiring successors with his example but burdening them with an impossible standard to meet.

They sit in the second-floor bedroom named for him. They stare at his picture on the walls or his bust in the Oval Office. They study his speeches, read his letters, glance at the copy of the Emancipation Proclamation under glass. Some have even wondered if they saw or felt his ghost. In their darkest moments, especially during war or crisis, they ask themselves what Lincoln would do. Some find an answer; others do not.

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“He remains an inspiration for presidents whether they’re Republican or Democrat,” said Jay Winik, author of “April 1865,” a book about the final days of the Civil War. “When they look at him, he almost defies explanation. He sort of lives somewhere in the stratosphere.”

Mark K. Updegrove, director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, said Lincoln remained a touchstone for those who followed. “There’s no president I’ve interviewed — Ford, Carter, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 — who hasn’t said that it was Lincoln that they thought of first and foremost as an inspiration during the most trying days of their presidencies,” Mr. Updegrove said. “He is unquestionably the standard.”

But as Mr. Obama discovered, one maddeningly out of reach. After so much emulation in his early days — even assembling his own “team of rivals” by putting Hillary Rodham Clinton in the cabinet — the president has made less effort lately to assert a connection. The heady talk of Mr. Obama as a latter-day Lincoln has given way along with his popularity ratings.

“How do you live up to him?” asked Paul R. Tetreault, director of Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was shot. “He is the one who all presidents are measured against.”

The theater has led the way with commemorations of the anniversary. Civil War re-enactors gathered outside on the street on Tuesday before a gala evening performance, to be followed by an all-night vigil. Tourists streamed through Petersen House across the street, where a mortally wounded Lincoln was taken and eventually died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865.

In the education center next door, artifacts have been assembled from collections around the country, including the coat and stovepipe hat Lincoln was wearing, a pair of broken eyeglasses he had laced together with string, the one-shot derringer fired by John Wilkes Booth and a flag soaked with Lincoln’s blood. In the center of the building stands a 34-foot-tall tower of Lincoln books, including roughly half of the 15,000 known volumes about the 16th president.

“This is one of the holiest sites in Washington,” said Mr. Tetreault, who has been planning for the anniversary for two years. As he spoke, he walked through Petersen House to the cramped back bedroom where Lincoln expired and his secretary of war reportedly declared, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

The ages have accepted him. Whatever his failings, Lincoln is regularly named the greatest president in surveys of historians. More than 600 schools have been named after him, more than for any president. Asked who was greater, Americans polled in 2012 by The New York Times and CBS News picked Lincoln over George Washington, 55 percent to 31 percent.

“One of the reasons why he ends up getting ranked higher on more recent surveys is he is effectively a martyr for the presidency,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston professor who, with Justin Vaughn of Boise State University, released a survey of historians in February listing Lincoln on top. “He gave what he called the last full measure of devotion for his office.”

Long before Mr. Obama, presidents have sought illumination in Lincoln’s legacy. Theodore Roosevelt as a young boy was said to have watched Lincoln’s funeral procession pass his grandparents’ house in New York. He considered the slain president “my great hero” and treasured a ring with a lock of Lincoln’s hair given to him by John Hay, the former Lincoln assistant who served as Roosevelt’s secretary of state.

Although Lincoln was initially a Republican icon, Woodrow Wilson made a pilgrimage to Springfield, Ill., during the 1912 campaign. Even before entering the White House, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that it was “time for us Democrats to claim Lincoln as one of our own.” If he was in town, Roosevelt visited the Lincoln Memorial every year on Lincoln’s birthday.

While confronting Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Harry S. Truman sent an aide to the Library of Congress to research Lincoln’s firing of Gen. George B. McClellan. Dwight D. Eisenhower kept a set of Lincoln’s collected works in the Oval Office and painted a portrait of him that hung in the Cabinet Room.

Sitting in the Lincoln Bedroom during the Vietnam War, Lyndon B. Johnson looked up at a picture and said, “I sure hope I have better generals than he did.” Richard M. Nixon, at age 12, was given a picture of Lincoln that hung over his bed. During his own Vietnam trials, he made a spontaneous nighttime visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

Ronald Reagan reported a couple of instances when his dog, Rex, acted oddly, which “nearly made me join the believers” that Lincoln’s ghost haunted the mansion. Bill Clinton, of course, got in trouble for inviting political donors to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, but once told Mr. Winik that he wanted to write his own Lincoln biography.

Few presidents revered Lincoln more than George W. Bush, who read 14 biographies of him while president and still has two paintings of Lincoln in his office in Dallas. “There was more of an affinity, or looking to Lincoln, than other presidents because Bush was a wartime president,” said Peter H. Wehner, who as an aide to Mr. Bush organized a meeting for him with Lincoln scholars like Mr. Winik.

And then there is Mr. Obama, who as the first African-American president traces a unique lineage to the Great Emancipator. “The president really admires Lincoln’s grace and largeness of spirit, the willingness to subjugate his own ego and embrace former opponents and even enemies to put the greater good first,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime adviser.

Mr. Obama has signed a proclamation declaring Wednesday a Day of Remembrance for Lincoln, calling for flags to be flown at half-staff. “President Lincoln has passed on a tremendous legacy to us, and we too are called to do great things,” he wrote.

Whether he or other presidents can live up to that legacy is a question that haunts them. They have won election. Ahead of them is history. “There’s no doubt that when you get into the White House, you see all those pictures on the wall, and it’s inevitable to wonder, ‘How do I stack up?’ ” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Lincoln biographer. “It’s their final contest.”

Correction: April 16, 2015

An article on Wednesday about the 150th anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln referred incorrectly to the house from which Theodore Roosevelt as a young boy was said to have watched Lincoln’s funeral procession pass. It was his grandparents’ house, not his house.